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UPDATE
I decided to call it 'snazzeus'. Thank you all for your comments and suggestions.
**original text**
This isn't really appropriate for the bakery, but I am looking for advice from creative people. [marked-for-exiry]
I recently discovered that it is possible to get custom
playing cards printed reasonably cheaply in moderately small runs. So I'm making a deck-building game. That is, there is a meta-game of deciding which cards to start the game with. (It's not a trading card game; players won't have to buy booster packs.)
It might even be fun - I'm certainly enjoying the process of designing it.
One of the issues is that some (but not all) of the cards are reversible. Obviously this means that the back of the cards need to be rotationally symmetric, to avoid leaking information about the player's hand.
While mulling this over, it occurred to me that it would be fun to use an ambigram for the game logo. See wikipedia link for what an ambigram is - but in this case it's essentially a representation of the name which has two-fold rotational symmetry.
So, after some investigation, I figured that one option is to create a name using only letters which look like a letter (the same or different) when up-side down. (Some of them need particular gylph styles to work - for example an 'a' and 'e' form a pair only if the 'a' has a curly top stroke.) After trying to do it manually I wrote a script which generates such words, and picked (or modified) some more.
This is the combined list:
anpodue
azooze
dodopop
dwomp
edwompa
mogo-obow
ogozobo
punound
snazzeus
undspun
unjorun
wayohem
nyoocchu
sphocyds
cardpjeo
I hope for your comments on this list, but welcome any other suggestions.
what is an ambigram?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram
[Loris, Jan 14 2015]
my card designs so far (direct jpeg link)
http://www.lysisgam...m/temp/carddemo.jpg
The blue card one in from the lower-right has card size and 'important stuff inside' guidelines shown, (I forgot to turn them off). [Loris, Jan 14 2015]
flipscript - online ambigram generation service
http://www.flipscript.com/
Please don't try words from the above list in it - they might sue me for breaking their T&Cs if they think I'm doing research on how to make my logo. [Loris, Jan 14 2015]
Scott Kim specialty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kim
Fonts that are modified a little allow for a quite-wider range of ambigrams, including sentences, sometimes. [Vernon, Jan 14 2015]
Scott Kim TED Talk
http://www.ted.com/..._the_art_of_puzzles
Related to above link. [Vernon, Jan 14 2015]
wowtattoos
https://www.wowtattoos.com/
ambigrammatic tattoos [Loris, Jan 14 2015]
{arbitrary number} of cool ambigram designs
http://www.tripwire...gram-generator.html
There are many lists of other people's ambigrams on the web, and they all have numerous requests for personal ambigram designs in the comments [Loris, Jan 14 2015]
Check domain / username availability
http://namechk.com/
One shot check aAcross a wide variety of services [tatterdemalion, Jan 14 2015]
game website
http://snazzeus.com
now with content. [Loris, Mar 19 2015]
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Annotation:
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I think undspun is nice, it sounds good to me. I'm dutch and to me it sounds a little like ontspon, which means unravel, of a plot or string. You could say undspun is ancient germanic for as the game unravels. |
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Is there a theme to the game (fantasy, SF, horror, humor)?
I would want that before choosing a name, even nonsense
words have a flavor. |
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And if you go with capital letters, you add "I", "H" "X" "N"
to letters that that are rotationally symmetrical with
themselves (along with "S" "Z" and "O"). "M-W" still work
in caps. |
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Then there are some cheats where they aren't identical,
but can be written that way. "V-A", if you put a dot in
place of the bar, and in the V, or simply use a thick
point, people will read it correctly. (That's the only
one I can come up with, admittedly). If you add in
numbers "4-h", "7-L", "8-8" or "8-B", "1-I", "3-E", "6-9-b-d"
all work. Not sure that's actually useful. |
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I'm making every card a different abstract design. This is partly because I can't draw, and didn't want to commit the resources to commissioning lots of high-quality artwork at this stage, and partly because I like patterns. |
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I'll put up a link to the few designs I've done so far. They're not finalised, and some definitely need more work - but do feel free to comment on them if you want to. |
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MechE - yes.
I'm actually taking a slightly odd route to ambigram generation - most people decide what they want to say first. And then do *amazing* things combining different parts of letters, and clever twiddles your brain disregards when upside-down to make it work.
I can't do that at all well. |
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There is also an online service which does it automatically, which is fun to play with, although I don't really like the fonts, and I suspect that the extended licence you need for commercial use might be prohibitive.
And there's at least one guy doing it by hand as a service for tattoos. I'll add links. |
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I assume that another good characteristic would
be if www.*.com was available and the name was
not already used in such a way that getting a
registered trademark would be an issue. |
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Also, be sure it doesn't look too weird when an
upside-down TM or (R) symbol is added at the
beginning of the name. Normally you'd just put
the symbol at the end, but I assume there's no
legal reason not to put one in each orientation to
maintain rotational symmetry. |
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I second [MechE]'s request for the theme of the
game. Or was that why you shared your card
designs? It looks to me like a number based game
(various numbers of hearts and stars?) rather than
having a specific theme, but with a cheerful
hearts and stars kind of feel? |
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I guess "pounod" which sounds like "pow - nod",
and looks like "pound", would be more appropriate
for a battle game involving large rocks and giants. |
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For your more cheerful theme, what about:
pepodad |
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padunped - the "n" always sounds like an "m" when
I say it, but otherwise it rolls off the tongue
pretty well and has no Goggle hits (until
tomorrow). |
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azooze and snazzeus stand out to me as the best in your list since they are a) relatively easy to pronounce, and b) don't sound completely contrived. |
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If the game is going to be fast you could do a simple name like: dip, nou, boq. |
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If you could incorporate a word that describes an aspect of the game that would be good, e.g. uniun (pronounced union; for a game where you group similar cards). |
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//uniun//
[xaviergisz], that's brilliant. |
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Snazzeus.com - web domain is available, and 'snazzeus' as a username is still open for several online services such as Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, etc. |
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All of which you will want to secure soon if you intend to use the name for promotional purposes. |
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My favorite was dodopop but that one's taken. |
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// azooze and snazzeus stand out to me as the best in your list since they are a) relatively easy to pronounce, and b) don't sound completely contrived. |
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They are also easy to remember, easy to remember how to spell, and unique. "azooze" has been grabbed up for a lot of things already. |
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I think some of you are starting off assuming a larger scale project than I'm working to. I was thinking success could be a basic objective of perhaps 25 backers on Kickstarter. For the actual printing, 100 decks is where it starts to be economic to add a custom pack, so that's sort of a target. |
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Registering IP is not going to happen unless interest is massive. I wasn't even going to do anything on facebook, twitter etc.. |
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But I am persuaded on the domain name thing.
dodopop is also a favourite among people I've asked in person. Is the .com domain so essential? It seems to be the only one taken, and that website seems to be giving a server error. |
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Heh. it's a pity wco.com is taken.
The quick and dirty code I made to screen names can only accept one alternative for each letter. I translated 'o' as itself. But I've just tweaked it to pair with 'c', and screened some more. |
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Here's one more idea, whichI now kind of like...
cardpjeo |
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I'll add those to the list. |
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//I second [MechE]'s request for the theme of the game. Or was that why you shared your card designs? It looks to me like a number based game (various numbers of hearts and stars?) rather than having a specific theme, but with a cheerful hearts and stars kind of feel?// |
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Yes, it was.
The basic gameplay is that the hearts are defence and the stars are attacks. The objective is to play your cards in such a way as to beat the defence on your opponent's cards. It totally could be played with fantasy, SF etc designs, that's even what I originally envisaged. I just don't have the resources to implement that.
I'm trying to design the game such that it works for children to play in a playground over playtime. So it's fairly short, can be played with one pack of cards, doesn't require counters to keep track of resources and so on. |
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You should sign up for the accounts and secure the domain name, "just in case". You may not want or see the need for those resources right now, but if your product is successful, you will want and need them then, and if you get them now, you'll have them then. |
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As opposed to somebody else having them, who will see they are available, realize you're going to want them, and secure them in order to squat and offer to resell them to you at a much MUCH higher price. |
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So get them now while they're available and free/cheap, it's no big loss if nothing comes of it, and solves a potential big problem if something does come of it. |
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If you're looking to kickstart, you obviously intend to promote the product at some level, so it could become more popular than you anticipate, and it wouldn't hurt to be ready for it. Plus it shows your kickstarter backers you're prepared. |
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You definitely want " .com" because if you don't have it, someone else does and it causes confusion. (Ask the guy who runs Nissan Computers how that is going.) Dot com is what everyone is expecting you to have. |
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//abbadabbadoo// doesn't work - it would become
"oopeqqepeqqe" on rotation. |
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shop boys (font dependent on h/y) |
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"shoq boys" (p inverts to d) |
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ploy
i deal pip : play
i passed !
held : did leap !
hold |
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"Oooh-pecky-pecky" might be a good name for a different sort of game, though. |
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//hey// would be "hay" on rotation. |
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...prolly too French. unaxenu oqueanbo |
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I did it! I bought the domain, I mean.
In the end I decided to go for 'snazzeus'; thank you all for your help and advice.
So now the domain exists and is attached to my pre-existing hosting, but there's nothing
worth looking at there (yet). |
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Most of the delay was due to putting it off, because of the faff with passwords - for some
reason my hosting company gives me a different one for every service. And all the
instructions are in French, which doesn't help enormously. |
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I'm about three-quarters of the way through designing the card images. |
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Is anyone interested in updates of how this goes? ...or alternatively, anyone particularly
want me to kill this thread ASAP? |
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snazzeus sounds snazzy. Dodopop sounds fun. Well done
and good luck. |
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I like "dopdop", or "n'boqu" (or you could have "enboqua" I suppose too) |
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hay : pop in u! dod : hey
(tr. "Very good, please return here yourself, (i.e with further updates about this project), my good man, if you don't mind") |
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